Without a Hero Read online

  Well. And that was a break—at least now he wouldn’t have to use the ivory goad.

  Bernard looked up at the old elephant in wonder—she still had a bit of showmanship in her, after all. Either that, or it was senile dementia. She was old—Bernard didn’t know quite how old, though he did know she was a veteran of thirty-eight years with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus who’d performed under the name “Bessie Bee” and responded to “Shamba”—that is, if you happened to have the ivory goad in your hand. Bernard shot a glance up the drive, where a white Jaguar sedan was beginning to define itself against a billowing backdrop of dust, and then he heard the screech of the monkeys as they shot out of their cages and up into the trees, and he began to compose himself. He forced a smile, all red-cheeked and long-toothed, cinched the leopard-skin belt, squared his pith helmet and marched forward to greet his guests.

  By the time the Benders rolled up to the veranda, the parrots were in the trees, the marabou stork was pecking at a spot of offal in the dirt, and the lions were roaring lustily from their hidden pens out back. Roland, decked out in his Masai toga and lion’s-tooth necklace, bounded down the steps with alacrity to hold open the door for Bender, while Bessie Bee shambled around in the near distance, flapping her ears and blowing about in the dust. “Mr. Bender,” Bernard cried, extending his hand to a fortyish man in sunglasses and polo shirt, “welcome to Africa.”

  Bender sprang out of the car like a child at the zoo. He was tall, lean, tanned—why did they all have to look like tennis pros? Bernard wondered—and stood there twitching a moment in the heat. He pumped Bernard’s hand professionally and then launched into a lip-jerking, ear-tugging, foot-thumping apology: “Sorry we’re late, Bernard, but my wife—have you met my wife?—my wife just had to get a couple rolls of film and we wound up buying out half of Reynoso’s Camera in Bakersfield—you know it?—good prices. Real good prices. Hell, we needed a new video camera anyway, especially with”—he gestured to take in the house, the outbuildings, the elephant, the monkeys in the trees and the sun-blasted plains beyond—“all this.”

  Bernard was nodding, smiling, murmuring agreement, but he was on autopilot—his attention was fixed on the wife, whom Roland was fussing over now on the far side of the car. She raised her lovely white arms to fluff her hair and imprison her eyes behind a pair of sunglasses and Bernard called out a greeting in his best British-colonial accent (though he was British by ancestry only and had never in his life been east of Reno). The second wife, of course, he was thinking as she returned his greeting with a vague little pouting smile.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Bernard said in response to some further idiocy from the husband’s lips, his watery blue eyes shifting to the daughter now—as black-headed as an Indian, and nearly as dark—and he saw right away that she was trouble, the sort of child who cultivates ugliness as a weapon.

  Nicole Bender gave him a long slow appraisal over the hood of the car, and in the next moment he was ducking round the grille to squeeze her hand as if he were trying on a glove for size. “Beastly day,” he said, proud of the Britishism, and then he was leading her up the broad stone steps and into the house, while her husband fumbled with an armload of guns and the daughter slouched along behind, already complaining about something in a nagging querulous little whine of a voice.

  “I’m not saying that, Mike—you’re not listening to me. I said the gazelles are very nice and they’ll be perfect for the office, but I wanted something, well, bigger for the front hall and at least three of the zebra—two for the den, I thought, and we’re going to need one for the ski lodge…you know, to hide that ugly paneling behind the bar?”

  Mike Bender was deep into his fourth gin and tonic. Already the elation he’d felt over his first kill had begun to dissipate, replaced now by a gnawing sense of frustration and anger—why couldn’t Nikki shut her face, even for a second? No sooner had they changed clothes and got out there on the savannah or veldt or whatever you wanted to call it, than she’d started in. He’d squeezed off a clean shot at a Thomson’s gazelle at two hundred yards and before the thing’s head had hit the ground, she was running it down. Oh, she gasped, as if she’d been surprised on the toilet, but it’s so small, isn’t it? And then she struck a pose for Puff and the colored guy who carried the guns and skinned out the carcasses. Almost like a rabbit with horns.

  And now the great white hunter was leaning across the table to reassure her, his gut drawn tight against the khaki safari shirt, his accent so phony it was like something out of a Monty Python routine. “Mrs. Bender, Nicole,” he began, mopping his blood blister of a face with a big checked handkerchief, “we’ll go out for zebra in the morning, when it’s cool, and if it’s three you want, we’ll get them, there’s no problem with that. Four, if you like. Five. If you’ve got the bullets, we’ve got the game.”

  Mike watched as the canny crewcut head swiveled toward him. “And Mike,” Puff said, as amenable as any tour guide but with just the right hint of stagery in his voice, “in the evening, it’s the big stuff, the man-maker, old Simba himself.”

  As if in response, there was a cough and roar from somewhere out beyond the darkened windows, and Mike Bender could feel the wildness of it on the thin night air—lion, the lion he’d dreamed about since his aunt had taken him to the Central Park Zoo as a boy and the roar of the great shaggy yellow-eyed things had shaken him to his primordial root. To be out there, in that African night that was haunted with predators, big-headed and thick-skinned, the pounce, the slash, the crack of sinew and bone—it was at once terrifying and wonderful. But what was that smell of oil?

  “What do you say, old man? Are you game?” Puff was leering at him now, and behind Puff’s blocky leonine figure, the faces of his wife and daughter, arrayed like tribal masks.

  Nothing fazed Mike Bender, the King of Encino. No seller could hold out against him, no buyer hope for more. His contracts were vises, his promotions sledgehammers, his holdings as solid as a mountain of iron. “I’m game,” he said, touching his lips, running his fingers through his hair, jabbing at his elbows and underarms in a rising plume of metabolic excess. “Just oil up my H&H Magnum and point me toward ‘em; it’s what I’ve wanted all my life—”

  There was a silence and his words seemed to hang in the air, empty of conviction. His daughter crouched over her plate, looking as if she were sucking on something rotten; his wife had that alert, let’s-go-shopping look in her glittering little eyes. “Really. I mean, ever since I was a kid, and—how many are out there, anyway? Or do you keep count?”

  Puff stroked the graying stubble of his head. There was another roar, muted this time, followed by the stabbed-in-the-belly whoop of the hyena. “Oh, we’ve got a good-sized pride out there—twelve or fourteen, I’d say, and a few rogue males.”

  “Are there any big ones, with manes? That’s what we want.” He shifted his gaze to Nicole. “Maybe the whole thing, stuffed, standing up on its hind legs, what do you think, Nik? For maybe the reception room at the Beverly Hills office?” And then he made a joke of it: “Hey, if Prudential can get away with it—”

  Nicole looked satisfied. So did Puff. But his daughter wasn’t about to let him off so easily. She let out a snort of contempt, and the three of them turned toward her. “And so you go and kill some poor lion that isn’t hurting anybody, and what’s that supposed to prove?”

  Puff exchanged a look with him, as if to say, Now isn’t that adorable?

  Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose pushed aside her salad plate. Her hair hung in her eyes in greasy black coils. She’d eaten nothing, having separated the tomatoes from the greens and the greens from the croutons and the croutons from the garbanzo beans. “Sting,” she spat, “Brigitte Bardot, the New Kids, all of them say it’s like animal death camps, like Hitler, and they’re doing this special concert to save the animals in France, in Paris—”

  “One lion more or less isn’t going to hurt anybody,” Nicole said, cutting the child off, and her mouth
was drawn tight against the swell of her collagen-enhanced lips. “And I think your father’s idea is super. An erect lion standing there as people come in the door—it’s, it’s symbolic is what it is.”

  Mike Bender couldn’t tell if he was being ribbed or not. “Listen, Jasmine,” he began, and his leg started to thump under the table as he tugged at his ear and fooled with his cutlery.

  “Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” she fired back.

  Mike knew she’d always hated her name, an inspiration of her mother, the sort of crackbrained woman who saw spirits in the sunset and believed that he was the reincarnation of John D. Rockefeller. To throw it up to him, and to remind him of his ex-wife and all the mistakes he’d ever made or contemplated, his daughter insisted on her full name. Always.

  “Okay: Jasmine Honeysuckle Rose,” he said, “listen to me. All of this hippie-dippy save-the-environment crap might be all right if you’re twelve, but you’ve got to realize hunting is as natural a part of man as, as—”

  “Eating or drinking,” Puff put in, rounding off the participle with a pseudo-Etonian ring.

  “Right!” Jasmine cried, on her feet now, her eyes like sinkholes, her mouth twitching at the corners. “And so’s shitting, farting and, and fucking!” And then she was gone, stamping down the trophy-hung hallway to her room, where she flung the door to with a thunderous crash.

  A moment of silence descended on the table. Puff’s eyes lingered on Nicole as she raised her arms to stretch and show off her breasts and the prim white pockets of shaved flesh under her arms. “Cute kid, huh?” he said. There was no mistaking the sarcasm this time.

  “Real cute,” Nicole said, and they were in league.

  Turning to Mike as the colored guy came through the door with a platter of gazelle steaks and mesquite-roasted ears of corn, Puff let his voice grow warm and confidential. “Zebra in the morning, Mike,” he said. “You’ll like that.” He leveled his watery gaze on him. “And then”—the gazelle steaks hitting the table, little dollops of blood-running flesh—“and then we load up for lion.”

  It wasn’t that he bolted, actually—Bernard had seen worse, much worse—but he was on the verge of it. Either that or he was about to pass out. Any way you sliced it, it was a bad situation, the kind of encounter that made Bernard wish he’d never heard of Africa, lions, game parks or real estate people.

  They’d come on the lion in the old almond grove. The trees there were like twisted antlers, leafless and dead, set out in rows as far as you could see, and the ground beneath them was littered with fallen branches. “Not too close now,” Bernard had warned, but Bender wanted to be sure of the shot, and he got himself in a bind. In the next moment he was standing there knee-deep in the litter, jerking and shrugging like a spastic, the gun to his shoulder and nowhere to go, and the lion was coming at him with as much pure malice as Bernard had seen in his fourteen years as proprietor of Puff’s African Game Ranch. And while Bernard didn’t like to intervene—it always caused hard feelings after the fact—Mrs. Bender was a heartbeat away from being an aggrieved widow and his own insurance rates were about to go through the roof, never mind the lawsuits. It was a moment, no doubt about it,

  The night before, after the Benders had gone off to bed, Bernard had had Espinoza go out and stir up the lions a bit and then set them loose—without their supper. That always put them in a mood, no matter how old, toothless and gimpy they might be. Let them go a night without horse meat and they were as savage as anything you’d encounter anywhere on earth. For Bernard, it was standard practice. Give the guests their money’s worth, that was his motto. If they suspected that the lions were penned up ninety-nine percent of the time, none of them let on—for all they knew the beasts lived out there among the drought-ravaged almond trees and camouflaged oil rigs. And besides, it wasn’t as if they had anywhere to go—the entire property was circumscribed by a twenty-foot-deep dry moat with a twelve-foot-high electrified fence rising up behind it. The ones the guests didn’t put holes in would just wander back to their cages in a day or so, roaring their bellies out for horse meat and offal.

  In the morning, after a breakfast of kippers and eggs and while the daughter slept in, Bernard had taken the Benders out after their zebra. They’d driven out to the water hole—an abandoned Olympic-sized swimming pool Bernard had planted up to look natural—and, after some discussion of price, the Benders—or, rather, the wife—decided on five. She was something, the wife. As good-looking a woman as Bernard had ever laid eyes on, and a better shot than her husband. She took two of the zebra at a hundred and fifty yards, barely a mark on the hides. “You can shoot, little lady,” Bernard said as they sauntered up to the nearest of the fallen zebra.

  The zebra lay there on its side beneath the knifing sun, and already the first flies had begun to gather. Bender was crouched over one of the carcasses in the near distance, inspecting it for bullet holes, and Roland was back in the Jeep, whetting his skinning knife. From the hills beyond, one of the starved lions let loose with an irascible roar.

  Nicole smiled at him, pretty—awfully pretty—in her Banana Republic shorts and safari shirt. “I try,” she said, unbuttoning her shirt to reveal a peach-colored halter top decorated with a gold pin in the shape of a rifle. He had to bend close to read the inscription: Nicole Bender, Supermarksman Award, N.R.A., 1989.

  Then it was lunch and siesta, followed by gin and bitters and a few hands at canasta to while away the waning hours of the afternoon. Bernard did everything he could to amuse the lady, and not just in the interest of business—there was something there, something beating hot and hard beneath the mask of blusher and eyeliner and the puffed-up lips, and he couldn’t help feeling the tug of it. It had been tough since Stella Rae had left him, and he took his tumbles where he could find them—after all, that came with the territory too.

  At any rate, they took the Jeep Wrangler, a cooler of beer, Bender’s .375 Holland & Holland, the lady’s Winchester .458 Mag and his own stopper—the .600 Nitro—and headed out to where the twisted black branches of the orchard raked the flanks of the hills in the far corner of the ranch. It was where the lions always went when you set them loose. There was a little brook there—it was a torrent in season, but now it wasn’t much more than a trickle. Still, they could lap up some water and roll in the grass and find a poor striped shade beneath the naked branches of the trees.

  From the start, even when they were still on the gin and bitters and waiting out the heat, Bender had seemed edgy. The man couldn’t sit still, rattling on about escrows and titles and whatnot, all the while tugging at his lips and ears and tongue like a third-base coach taking signals from the dugout. It was nerves, that’s what it was: Bernard had taken enough dudes out there to recognize a fellow measuring out his own manhood against that big tawny thing stalking his imagination. One guy—he was a TV actor; maybe a fag, even—had got himself so worked up he’d overloaded on the gin and pissed his pants before they got the Jeep started. Bernard had seen him a hundred times since on the flickering tube, a hulking muscular character with a cleft chin and flashing eyes who was forever smashing crooks in the face and snaring women by the waist, but he could never forget the way the guy’s eyes had vanished in his head as the piss stain spread from his crotch to his thighs and beyond. He took one look at Bender and knew there was trouble on the horizon.

  They’d agreed on $11,500 for a big male with a mane, Bernard knocking off the odd five hundred because they’d taken the two extra zebra and he figured he’d give them a break. The only male he had of any size was Claude, who must have been something in his day but was now the leonine equivalent of a nonagenarian living on a diet of mush in a nursing home. Bernard had picked him up for a song at a flea-bitten circus in Guadalajara, and he must have been twenty-five years old if he was a day. He was half-blind, he stank like one of the walking dead and the molars on the lower left side of his jaw were so rotten he howled through his food when he ate. But he looked the part, especially at a distance,
and he still carried some of the flesh he’d put on in his youth—and the pain in his jaw made him cranky; savage, even. He would do, Bernard had thought. He would do just fine.

  But there was Bender, stuck in a morass of dead black branches, trembling all over like a man in an ice bath, and the lion coming at him. The first shot skipped in the dirt at two hundred feet and took Claude’s left hind paw off at the joint, and he gave out with a roar of such pure raging claw-gutting bone-crunching nastiness that the idiot nearly dropped his rifle. Or so it seemed from where Bernard was standing with the Mrs. and Roland, fifteen yards back and with the angle to the right. Claude was a surprise. Instead of folding up into himself and skittering for the bushes, he came on, tearing up the dirt and roaring as if he’d been set afire—and Bender was jerking and twitching and twittering so much he couldn’t have hit the side of a beer truck. Bernard could feel his own heart going as he lifted the Nitro to his shoulder, and then there was the head-thumping blast of the gun and old Claude suddenly looked like a balled-up carpet with a basket of ground meat spread on top of it.

  Bender turned to him with a white face. “What the—?” he stammered, and he was jerking at his fingers and flailing his arms. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  It was Bernard’s moment. A jetliner rode high overhead, bound for the northwest, a silver rivet in the sky. There was an absolute, unutterable silence. The wife held her peace, the remaining lions cowered somewhere in the grass and every bird on the ranch was holding its breath in the dying wake of that rolling cannonade. “Saving your bloody life,” Bernard snarled, hot and disgusted and royally pissed off, but proud, as always, of the Britishism.

  Mike Bender was angry—too angry to eat his kippered whatever and the deep-fried toast and runny eggs. And where was the coffee, for god’s sake? They were in Bakersfield, after all, and not some canvas tent in Uganda. He barked at the colored guy—all tricked up to look like a native, but with an accent right out of Compton—and told him he wanted coffee, black and strong, even if he had to drive to Oildale for it. Nicole sat across the table and watched him with mocking eyes. Her zebra had been perfect, but he’d fouled up two of the three he’d shot: But Mike, she’d said, we can’t hang these—they’ll look like colanders. And then the business with the lion. He’d looked bad on that one, and what was worse, he was out eleven and a half thousand bucks and there was nothing to show for it. Not after Puff blew the thing away. It was just meat and bone, that’s all. Shit, the thing didn’t even have a head after the great white hunter got done with it.